Apple started rolling out iOS 16 to consumers a few hours ago and while the headlining features include stuff like redesigned lock screens, improved notifications, and passkeys, there is another relatively minor capability that might be appreciated by more tech-savvy audiences. Basically, Safari 16.0 released with iOS 16 finally supports images in AVIF format.
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For those unaware, AVIF is an image format like JPEG, PNG, GIF, and WebP. It's developed by the Alliance for Open Media, whose members include Amazon, Apple, ARM, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Netflix, Nvidia, Samsung, and Tencent.
AVIF offers a bunch of features such as lossy and lossless compression and multiple color spaces. The key benefit for end users is that it offers significant savings in bandwidth utilization, which should result in better performance while browsing web pages too.
Although Microsoft Edge does not support AVIF images at all, Chrome has supported it since version 85 on desktop and version 97 on Android. Similarly, Firefox support has also been active in this area since version 93 released last year.
Now, Safari 16.0 on iOS 16 handles AVIF images too, with macOS Ventura and iPadOS support coming next month. Hopefully, this latest addition will also push Microsoft to put some more effort into this area.
If you're interested in all the other changes present in the latest version of Safari too, you can read the detailed changelog here.
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